A few days ago Ross Douthat, one of
the regular columnists for the New York
Times, published an essay entitled “The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith." I think that Douthat, who holds somewhat conservative political views and is a practicing Roman Catholic, is meant to offer a countervailing voice on an editorial page dominated by writers of a leftward drift. Though I often agree with his ideas, my personal liking for him--not that we have ever met--is based in his intelligence and the courtesy and civility with which he and colleagues with very different points of view conduct themselves in the NYT podcast "The Argument."
Douthat’s column is a kind of
review of, or response to, an anthology of essays published in the Chronicle of Higher Education under the somber
general title “Endgame”—as in the end of the line for literary study. I have not yet read these essays. I will, I suppose, though I probably don’t
need to. It is likely that I could have written them myself, all of them,
with all their differing perspectives; for one version or another of the central
arguments, debates, laments, complaints or boasts they advance has been current
during every stage of my career as a professor of literature.
When I
first joined the Princeton faculty in 1965, there was a bunch of emeriti geezers
who used to sit around the coffee lounge of a morning in endless conversation
about one of two cognate topics: how the Department was going to hell in a
handbasket, and how much better it had been in the good old days. I thought this was really pathetic, though I
prudently held my peace, at least awaiting a tenure decision. Then forty years passed, and something odd
happened. I noted that the Department
had gone to hell in a handbasket, and that things had been different and a lot
better in the good old days.
The “endgame”
analysis of literary study is not new, and my forty years of teaching were
approximately the forty talked about in William Chace’s much noted essay
entitled “The Decline of the English Department” published in The American Scholar, the magazine
of Phi Beta Kappa, in 2009.
Chace is a former English professor (modernism, Irish writers, that sort
of thing) and the former president of three of our most prestigious colleges
and universities. Once he had no further
aspirations along those lines, perhaps, he started writing a series of things
in the genre of “At Last the Truth Can be Told.” In this episode he began by noting “a
well-publicized shift in what undergraduate students prefer to study”. Heading toward the bottom line, there has been
a marked decrease in the popularity of all humanities majors, but particularly
I would have to say of the English major.
Forty years earlier about eight percent of all American undergraduates
were majoring in English. In 2003/2004
it was less than four percent. Those are
real statistics, but anecdote might be even better. I was aware that in the year I retired (2006)
there were just about half the number of English majors at Princeton as when I
was chairman of the department back in the ‘Eighties.
Douthat
singles out for special praise an essay by Simon During, an Australian scholar
of great ability who sees “the decline of the humanities as a new form of
secularization, an echo of past crises of established Christian faith.” Even without having read the essay, any
Christian scholar would recognize the truth of the thesis. While literary study cannot stand alone as
the paradigm of the humanities, it does play an outsized role in the academy. What are the “humanities?” The word derives from the Latin phrase litterae humaniores, the more “human” or
secular branches of writing as opposed to sacred texts, the stuff of “divinity”
or theological study. The introduction
of humanistic study into the universities, which began as a supplement to
“divinity”, soon enough went on to create a powerful alternative, even if its
literary canon had a cutoff date of roughly the year 65 of the common era. Furthermore there was in the cultural
prestige of the litterae humaniores
and the solemnity with which they were transmitted good reason to regard
academic humanists as members of an hieratic class, and consequently to
recognize that it may not be that Macbeth
has suddenly become repellent but the way it is being taught or not taught by a
secular clerisy that no longer “believes”.
In his decade-old essay Mr. Chace
was aware of complex causality, but no less so of root causes: especially a
want of professorial passion. “At the root,” he wrote, “is the failure of
departments of English across the country to champion, with passion, the books
they teach and to make a strong case to undergraduates that the knowledge of
those books and the tradition in which they exist is a human good in and of
itself.” Now this explanation was so
right on, as we used to say back in ‘sixty-eight, that it immediately generated
denial, indignation, and charges of bad faith from various eminences in the
Modern Language Association. The last
thing the VP for Sales wants to hear is that his company is selling something
that the “consumer base” doesn’t want to buy.
But the term passion, which plays so prominent a role in Christian theological
language, is deeply ambivalent. It may mean among other things an animating
enthusiasm on the one hand or a blinding fanaticism on the other. In 1927 the once celebrated French writer
Julien Benda published a book entitled La
trahison des clercs (The Treason of
the Intellectuals) in which he indicted the intellectuals for their
“treason”—not against the nation state but against European civilization—in
having with their political passions encouraged the disaster of the Great War. A wonderful scene in Erich Maria Remarque’s
novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
suggests that the chauvinism of cultural arbiters did more along those lines
than an archducal assassination.
The word clerc, still pronounced in England like
the common surname, Clark, is related to
our words cleric and clergy, originally denoting someone with
the learning uniquely characteristic of a churchman, a learning grounded in “moral
virtue,” as Chaucer puts it. He said
that of the Clerk of Oxenford—he who would gladly learn and gladly teach, as a
matter of fact. Chaucer’s Good Parson,
too, was “a learned man, a clerk”.
In what,
precisely, did the treason of the clercs
consist? In a chapter called “The Great
Betrayal” Benda actually produced a three-part enumerated indictment: 1. The clercs
have adopted political passions. 2. They bring their political passions into
their activities as clercs. 3. The
clercs have played the game of
political passions by their doctrines.
This third head had a particularizing subdivision: (a) the clercs
praise attachment to the particular and denounce the feeling of the universal, and (b) the clercs praise attachment to the practical, and denounce love of the
spiritual. The Treason of the Intellectuals made quite a splash back in the
day, and it is still worth a read. There
was some lively debate as to whether its inspiration was from the left or from
the right, but most people could see that it was an indictment of, or perhaps
only a lament for, a debilitating crisis of faith.
